Profile Mini-Feed Filtering Proves Misleading

Posted by Nick O'Neill on April 15th, 2008 1:14 AM

Jason Kincaid posted an interesting article on Techcrunch about how clicking the “X” in your mini-feed next to individual stories doesn’t actually remove the story from your friends’ newsfeeds. This is news to me and it is also news to a number of active developer forum participants.

Much of the debate surrounds the phrasing of the mini-feed warning statement. It states “Hiding will remove the story from your Mini-Feed and prevent anyone from seeing it.” Stating “anyone from seeing it” implies that nobody will be able to see it at all. If it is only from the mini-feed then they should state that. Honestly, I have used this feature on a number of occasions to prevent it from displaying in friends’ newsfeeds.

Now that I have found out that it was actually showing up in my friends’ newsfeed I feel somewhat misled. Will there be another newsfeed revolt? I doubt it but I can guarantee you that there will be backlash for this move and Facebook has a short period of time to resolve the issue. Ultimately, users should be able to prevent all stories from displaying in the newsfeed.

This issue was apparently brought up in the forums back in October but I was oblivious to the issue. Had I known then what I know now I definitely would have brought this issue to light. Did you think removing stories from your mini-feed also removed it from your friends’ newsfeeds or did you understand the message presented by Facebook?

Minifeed Screenshot

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 1:14 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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qz 6 months ago 1 point
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I always understood it to mean that no one would ever see that story anywhere on Facebook.

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Manolo 6 months ago 1 point
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The newsfeed is annoying anyway. I often got surprised that something landed on the News Feed which supposed should not.

I also had to recognize that Mini-Feed and News-Feed do not hang together and stories show up in the News Feed although they don't show up in my own Mini-Feed.

At the moment you can not control the News Feed properly - this is really scary.

I would suggest a full list of stories, in which you can make settings for Mini-Feed and News Feed seperately.

By the way, there is another bug:

If you click on privacy > NewsFeed and Mini-Feed and unklick "Show comments on discussion boards", they still show up in the News Feed - at least if you write a comment on the facebook page.

I am thankful for all stories on allfacebook, concerning stories about the very bad privacy settings (especially the News Feed).

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Paranoid Android 6 months ago 1 point
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I won't attempt to discuss the semantics of mini-feed warning but I did always take it to mean that clicking on the "x" would remove the story from the mini-feed AND thus prevent anyone from seeing that story from The Mini-Feed.

Being a natural-born FB stalker, I've always been concious about what goes out on my friends' feeds so I've always modified my mini-feed via the Privacy settings.

PS. This may not be news, but 3rd party apps do publish personal details that you've set as hidden, eg Netvibes browser widget displays your actual age next to your D.O.B.

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Brian Cooper 6 months ago 1 point
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Were you aware also that EVERY application (including the facebook developed ones) that I click ONLY publish stories about this in my Mini-Feed and NOT my News-Feed are viewable in News-Feeds of those friends without many friends of their own and thus few happenings in their News-Feed? I know this 100% as my Mum is a facebook member and she regularly asks me to check her account for one reason or another.

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Steve 6 months ago 1 point
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Yes, I was also under the impression that removing items from my mini-feed would stop them appearing in friends' news feeds. I'm now going to have to reconfigure most of my apps to not generate such items in the first place, if I can't delete them after the fact. If everybody did that, the mini-feed would become useless...

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http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/steverumsby

Charlie 6 months ago 1 point
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I only knew about that after a friend told me about stories she was seeing that I'd been removing for my mini-feed, and I totally agree.

Wasn't the reason they gave for not making the newsfeed public that people wouldn't be able to pull items about them off of the feed?

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Chris 6 months ago 1 point
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I second this article absolutely. I really considered myself an old stager on facebook, but some time in 2007 I found out that the X do not delete the stories from the News feed, and that was really surprising.

But now sth. I only found out a few weeks ago: I really felt on the safe side with applications with turned off News feed: "Publish stories in my News feed" was off and "Publish stories in my Mini feed was on".

Only now as a developer I understood that if "Mini feed" is on the stories are publish in News feeds of FRIENDS (!) at the same time, and the "my News feed" box really just affects MY OWN home page...

Without the knowledge of the 2 functions
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/P...
I always thought, I would stop ANY news feed entries by ticking the News Feed Box off, but now I know, that as soon as your Mini Feed is on, even if there is an entry there for a minute only, friends can read it days later in their News feeds.

I really don't like that, and found it quite okay to have stories in my Mini feed (for profile visitors) but that should not be Published on home pages...

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Daryl 6 months ago 1 point
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I believed it to mean that it wouldn't be displayed in my mini-feed (only).

However, I work in the Law, so perhaps I am more inclined towards assuming only that it does what it says within the context in which it says it.

Good article though.

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Yazan 6 months ago 1 point
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I used to think that rewmoving it from my mini feed would take it off the newsfeed but learnt otherwise when a friend commented on something i had done which i though i had hidden

i sent feedback to facebook but of course im sure it fell on deaf ears

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Andrew C 6 months ago 1 point
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I think there was a post on the facebook blog awhile back that explained this so I knew about it and so every time I want something to not broadcast, I have to go into my privacy preferences and deselect whatever app/profile info I plan to edit.

Really wish they would make it faaaar easier.

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http://www.andrewcafourek.com

bryan 6 months ago 1 point
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This is a good point. It totally slipped my mind that the Mini-Feed an News-Feed are completely separate. I guess you just need to control it from the privacy options.

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